When you’re talking about search engines, the noun to use, I feel like, is Google, right? Google’s like the noun and the verb of the search engine world. How important are other search engines when it comes to SEO? So the headline here is that DuckDuckGo installs are up.
Google searches are down due to people rejecting the AI that it tries to force feed you. That’s like still half the time, like not fully accurate. Usually based on like the first answer they found on Reddit, which isn’t always, it’s not always the gospel truth. It’s just the popular consensus. It’s actually bad sometimes. Their AI results.
So people are not fully jiving with the AI. It’s kind of controversial at this point. There’s a lot of people being like, “I don’t want the big three”. I don’t want ChatGPT. I don’t want Gemini. I don’t want Claude giving me answers. I want to do my own research. I want to sift through search results on my own. So people are going to alternative sources like Brave and DuckDuckGo to avoid the AI search aggregation. Overall, that got us thinking: how important are these other search engines?
Yahoo is still out there. There’s plenty of old people that use it thinking it’s Google. DuckDuckGo has its own search engine. Bing is a thing. However, I don’t think there’s any importance from the SEO side. I think you have to look at it like SEO is a business. It’s just fancy talk for getting more customers to your business. So if installs are up on DuckDuckGo great but they’re still less than five percent of the searches then who cares?
Google maintains 87.63% of global search traffic. Bing 3.45%. TikTok, 3.26%. (I wonder how Bing feels about TikTok having more searches). Yandex, 2.10%. And then DuckDuckGo is 1.38. So it’s behind Yandex and Baidu. So just from a business standpoint, sorry DuckDuckGo, but you’re just not relevant on the SEO side. Even if people are like, oh, why am I not ranking here? You’re not paying for ranking. You’re paying for customers. Even if people say: “I want SEO”. No, you don’t. You want customers.
